Categories

Meta

Month: November 2007

One of the first subjects I studied extensively in college was sociology, which made me do more people watching than ever but from an entirely different point of view. Today at the airport and on the plane and after deplaning I did more people watching and figured what the heck why not put some of my random thoughts down, what harm could it do?

This isn’t so much people watching but I noticed that coffins are roomier than an airplane lavatory, I know planes have limited room but come on! I know I am not skinny but I am not the biggest guy in the world but I doubt I could fully turn around in there.

I also noticed that people read the damnedest things, I saw OK Magazine, People, US, etc, etc, and I just don’t get it. Why do we care what someone is wearing or who is dating who? It means so little, yet takes so much attention and money from our daily lives, but for why?

Lastly, I am beginning to think children should be gagged and leashed, now I don’t really mean that but if you see my previous entry you will understand, if a parent won’t be a parent why should society be made to suffer? It’s just wrong to let your kids run wild at the expense of everyone else.

This video is my after flight baggage claim experience, just substitute the escalator for a baggage claim and one kid for about 5. I walked away so I didn’t mouth off, and to make matters worse the father was there to.

This is something many have said for quite a long time, and that I have been saying for just as long. It took me a long time to come around but now that I have my browsing experience has been much improved and the same can be said for anyone I know who uses a different browser, I prefer firefox but opera and others are incredible as well.

With all that said this is the story of how SitePoint tried to give Internet Explorer a fighting chance … and it lost anyway.

So today being Thanksgiving we decided to all go out to breakfast as a family, to the Big Bear Diner and boy do they love their bears at this place.

Towards the end of the meal I went outside with my brother so he could smoke and I could mingle with him, only to see the restaurants mascot come out and start marching around with a picket sign that said “Feed the Bears” and he proceeded to go to the corner. I felt bad because we broke his one bear picket line, you can’t see much but the weird as hell pic follows of the bear at the corner.

So I am at my brothers place in Portland, Oregon for Thanksgiving, and with him being gone during the day I wanted to be able to print map directions or anything else necessary while he was at work. The printer is a Brother MFC-440CN and was a recent purchase so I figured it would easily work with Windows Vista, I couldn’t be more wrong.

I was going to install just the driver but ran into issues as I couldn’t find the actual driver file in what brother had available for download. So instead I tried to download their self installer that bypassed windows and also added their own software for managing ink levels and paper amounts. This while proving successful was also an endless amount of pain.

The printing worked and all seemed fine with the world as I trekked off today to visit Multnomah Falls and Mcminville Dam outside Portland. Upon returning my plan was to take a few pics, resize them in photoshop, maybe edit them a little and then put them up on flickr, but alas photoshop wouldn’t respond. I tried restarting, no dice, I tried checking everything I could think of and still no dice. I sat staring at the task manager and deciphering memory usage for 5 minutes, and could not figure out why the processor and memory were both hovering in the 95+ percentage range.

So I went over in my head, what did I change on the machine? The previous night I had removed the Firefox 3 trunk build for the actual beta build but I figured that would cause no issues. Then it dawned on me, I had installed the printer software and I decided to remove it, figuring what the heck I still had the install information I could make it work again right?

Well upon removing the software presto!, everything worked again and so I figured the printer must have some kind of issues with resource usage or just some kind of odd conflict internally that I don’t have access to fix.

So in closing I have photoshop working, I just can’t print any photos. Now though I need to fix my brothers computer it is having wireless issues.

Oh and if you wanna see the photos you can click the above picture or visit the set here.

HR 4137, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, specifies that if a college does not agree to test technology to prevent illegal file sharing that all students at that college will lose their financial aide – even students who do not even own a computer.

The last almost 8 years have been an utter disappointment on so many levels, whether it be the climate crisis, the war in Iraq, the current state of our economy, and up until recently the rubber stamp congress that allowed our debt to spiral out of control.

It can be summed up in one word Bush, his fingerprints are all over the tragedy that our country has become, where one of the world’s richest men has to beg for congress to raise his taxes, where hundreds of thousands die in Iraq over an American war of aggression, and where our civil liberties are deserted at home in the name of security. All with a lot of foot stomping and holding of breath but without much genuine action by the Democratic party.

I bring this up not to make myself or anyone else feel bad, or to make anyone in fact feel nostalgic for the time before Bush, instead I bring it up out of an idea of hope, hope for the near future and for our children’s future. That hope manifested itself in Al Gore of all people in a phenomenal interview in the latest Rolling Stone magazine. I thought about trying to sum it up here but I can’t, it needs to be read in whole.

I just wish the former “next president of the United States” would run again, then we all could get excited, heck I’d quit my job and volunteer full time for him (seriously). I’m a member of the Green party and by and large I despise the democrats almost more than I do the republicans, heck I have voted for Ralph Nader twice, but I gotta say this time I could support that man, he’s got it right on so many levels now, all he has to do is recognize it.

Anyone who has known me throughout my life knows I like video games a lot, in fact as a kid I think I placed 3rd in my area in a local gaming competition at Blockbuster (remember when people actually went in to rent things?). As I got older other interests seemed to take gamings place and while I still played, I hardly was as serious about it as I once was.

That being said I went on a mini buying spree in the last week spending between two and three hundred dollars on 3 games, the reason the cost is so high was Guitar Hero 3 and it’s 100 buck price tag because of the controller. The games I purchased were the aforementioned Guitar Hero 3, Halo 3, and Call Of Duty 4. All being phenomenally well done, beautiful to look at, and fun to play games. So why am I blogging about it?

Length, or rather lack thereof, each game I purchased I have completed already and I don’t play them non stop as so many other interests need my attention as well. I think every game now has put so much emphasis on XBOX Live that they have neglected the person at home playing his game who doesn’t want to game online. Sure I have played online games and the quick fun burst of fighting another person is exciting as heck but I already bought the game, I don’t want to pay for another service so I can use the most intensive features of it.

So please if you read this, game developers add some length to your games, because if Grand Theft Auto IV is as short as the three games I mentioned then it may be my last for quite some time. Sixty bucks for a day of fun is too much if you ask me….